Live streaming current events over the Internet increases the demand for a reliable streaming infrastructure. Live streaming feeds are commonly used in such circumstances as major political speeches and events, sporting events, and other cultural happenings in which a large viewing audience is relying on the live streaming feed to be functioning properly. However, due to the distributed nature of any processing and delivery system of this scale, component failure is unavoidable and can interrupt or otherwise affect the quality of the output stream.
Mission-critical live streaming on the web is done today by building redundancy by having separate hardware and/or software encoders pushing roughly equivalent streams to be redundantly encoded. This encoding takes place in completely separate encoding pathways that produce separate primary and secondary streams. Failovers, which are automatic switches to redundant streams, attempt to minimize disruptions but since they use discrete and/or diverse components, glitch free failovers are generally unattainable.